The Afterlife
Immortality
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There are numerous attempts made by science to slow the process
of aging and it is still a common belief that the fountain of youth maybe find someday. Avoiding the looming shadow of death
has been the popular pursuit for many medical researchers. How to prolong human existence? How to extend the boundaries of an
ordinary lifespan? Gabrielle Boulianne of the University of Toronto discovered that fly life spans could be increased up to
40 percent by inserting a gene in motor neurons to make them produce more superoxide dismutase. This enzyme prevents the alteration
of excess oxygen in cells into harmful substances, a sort of "cellular rusting.". Pycnogeno is supposed to drastically counter
aging by eradicating those pesky free radicals which are harmful to cells, a free radical being an organic compound in which
some of the valence electrons are unpaired, occurring as a normal byproduct of oxidation reactions in metabolism. DHEA, Conenzyme
Q10 and many more promess to stop the death clock. Cryonics is another modern way to gain an extra life in the future against
the loss of the current one. Organ transplantation is limited until we design artificial organs
as there are always more people in need of organs than there are donors. People's religious beliefs may stop them from donating
organs. Even if this is not the case, families may find the prospect of having their deceased loved ones, to put it crudely,
chopped up, rather shocking. Increasingly, we hear the Greek Tithonius myth applied to the contemporary
aging story. In this immortality parable, a beautiful young man asked Aurora, the goddess of morning, to make him immortal.
She does. He ages continuously. Finally, pitying his never-ending dissolution, she makes him into a grasshopper. Instead of making the oldest of the old into grasshoppers, Society
and medecine have produced a population of disabled including the million or more nursing home residents so disabled that
twenty-four hour care is required, and the ten thousand individuals existing in irreversible vegetative states. National estimates
reveal approximately one- quarter of the aged to be in need of some type of long-term care. The American Hospital Association
estimated in 1991 that some 70 percent of all deaths are somehow negotiated or timed. Death is indispensable to nature and evolution. Without death there
would be no emergence of new individuals with genes better adapted to the changing environment. Without death there would
be no room for new species to emerge. Without death there would be no mating, no birth, no parenting, no
family warmth. Death is the price we pay for the enjoyment of love between man and woman, love between parent and child. Even
if medical technology allowed us to abolish death tomorrow, the world would become impossibly overpopulated, not to mention
that people might start getting bored. Symbolic Immortality The desire for immortality is a central drive of the human race. There
are five major answers: biological, religious, creative, natural and mystic. “Biology enables genetic preservation through
offspring; religious possibilities involve those of life after death; creative involve art or other creations left behind;
natural legacies are those provided by the recycling of one's components by nature and the maintenance of nature after one's
death; and mystic possibilities involve those of being part of some sort of mysterious post-life involvement.” Eternal sleep An opposite concept to the journey to the other world of heaven and/or
hell was a parallel idea of the deceased sleeping an eternal sleep. The parallel between death and sleep was immensely common
in literature and art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The above images of death abundant in funerary literature
were construed as a collective response to the disordering force of death. During the preparation of the funeral, the
death-sleep was made as comfortable as possible. The clothes that were sewn for the corpse had no knots, so that these would
not disturb the body. While sewing, the thread was never cut, but torn with hands, for it was believed that cut thread-ends
would make the deceased uncomfortable. A sewing-machine was never used, and the stitches were carefully made wide apart from
each other. No needle or pin was put into coffin. Also, one was not allowed to weep by the dead so that the tears would fall
on the body - it would distract the eternal sleep of the deceased. earth.
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copyright @ 2006 by DCPI |
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